CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

We'd love your help! Thanks for caring about the book.

Where to Edit

All edits should be made in the src directory.

The nostarch directory contains snapshots for sending edits to the publishers of the print version. The snapshot files reflect what has been sent or not, so they only get updated when edits are sent to No Starch. Do not submit pull requests changing files in the nostarch directory, they will be closed.

We use rustfmt to apply standard formatting to Rust code in the repo and dprint to apply standing formatting to the Markdown source and the non-Rust code in the project.

You will normally have rustfmt installed if you have a Rust toolchain installed; if for some reason you do not have a copy of rustfmt, you can add it by running the following command:

rustup component add rustfmt

To install dprint, you can run the following command:

cargo install dprint

Or follow the instructions on the dprint website.

To format Rust code, you can run rustfmt <path to file>, and to format other files, you can pass dprint <path to file>. Many text editors also have native support or extensions for both rustfmt and dprint.

Checking for Fixes

The book rides the Rust release trains. Therefore, if you see a problem on https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book, it may already be fixed on the main branch in this repo, but the fix hasn't gone through nightly -> beta -> stable yet. Please check the main branch in this repo before reporting an issue.

Looking at the history for a particular file can also give more information on how or whether an issue has been fixed or not if you're trying to figure that out.

Please also search open and closed issues and open and closed PRs before reporting a new issue or opening a new PR.

Licensing

This repository is under the same license as Rust itself, MIT/Apache2. You can find the full text of each license in the LICENSE-* files in this repository.

Code of Conduct

The Rust project has a code of conduct that governs all sub-projects, including this one. Please respect it!

Expectations

Because the book is printed, and because we want to keep the online version of the book close to the print version when possible, it may take longer than you're used to for us to address your issue or pull request.

So far, we've been doing a larger revision to coincide with Rust Editions. Between those larger revisions, we will only be correcting errors. If your issue or pull request isn't strictly fixing an error, it might sit until the next time that we're working on a large revision: expect on the order of months or years. Thank you for your patience!

Help wanted

If you're looking for ways to help that don't involve large amounts of reading or writing, check out the open issues with the E-help-wanted label. These might be small fixes to the text, Rust code, frontend code, or shell scripts that would help us be more efficient or enhance the book in some way!

Translations

We'd love help translating the book! See the Translations label to join in efforts that are currently in progress. Open a new issue to start working on a new language! We're waiting on mdbook support for multiple languages before we merge any in, but feel free to start!